Many storage systems may provide clients with access to data stored within a plurality of storage devices. For example, a storage controller may store client data within a set of storage devices that are locally accessible (e.g., locally attached to the storage controller) or remotely accessible (e.g., accessible over a network). A storage aggregate of storage may be generated from the set of storage devices (e.g., the storage aggregate may be stored across multiple storage devices). The storage aggregate may be exported from a storage file system to a client. The storage aggregate may appear as a single storage container to the client, such as a volume or logical unit number (lun). In this way, the storage aggregate abstracts away the details, from the client, of how the storage aggregate is physically stored amongst the set of storage devices.
Some storage systems may store data within a multi-tiered storage arrangement. For example, the storage controller may store data within a hard disk drive tier and a solid state storage tier. The hard disk drive tier may be used as a capacity tier to store client data and for processing input/output operations. The solid state storage tier may be used as a cache for accelerating the processing of storage operations. Unfortunately, different storage tier have different characteristics and behaviors, which can affect performance and guarantees provided to clients by a storage system.
In an example, a storage system may utilize a local storage tier and a remote third party storage tier as two of the storage tiers within which the storage system stores data. The storage system may be able to provide high availability, security, data consistency, data protection, and/or other guarantees using the local storage tier because the storage system may manage and control the local storage tier. However, the storage system may be unable to provide similar guarantees, such as that data is properly stored, managed, is consistent, and is accurate, to clients for the remote third party storage tier because the storage system does not manage and control the remote third party storage tier. For example, new data could be written to the remote third party storage tier. When reading the new data, old data or no data could be returned by the remote third party storage tier due to delay. Thus, the storage system may be unable to provide the same level of enterprise guarantees when working with the remote third party storage tier as backend storage.